Motor Mouth: Buick and Volvo are the comeback kids

Once near death, both marques are enjoying a resurgence, thanks in part to China and a newfound focus on quality

by
David Booth | December 16, 2016

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Everyone loves a comeback, the unexpected rejuvenation that tells us all our own personal redemption, as unlikely as it may sometimes seem, is still possible. The more unlikely the reclamation, the more we cheer. Down three to one in the World Series? Why, then pretty much everyone on the planet is now Chicagoan. Haven’t won anything in 108 years? Well, five million Illinoisians didn’t take to the street because the Cubs won last year’s World Series.

If the depths of despair be the determination of our rejoice at resurrection, then the cheers should be loud for the two most unlikely automotive comebacks — Buick and Volvo. As the legendary Yogi Berra said (he was describing the 1973 Mets, who didn’t win the World Series), they are the most overwhelming of underdogs.

It’s impossible to imagine two less exciting brands, one once inexorably tied to the least desired demographic in marketing (that would be the post-retirement blue-rinse set), the other the purview of the paranoid and the safety conscious. And yet — cue those parades! — both are setting record sales, Buick on its way to 1.23 million sales, and Volvo, in 2015, selling more than 500,000 cars for the first time in its storied 89-year existence. Yes, while Tesla has been getting kudos for revolutionizing the industry and Volkswagen has so clamorously imploded, Buick and Volvo have quietly gone about becoming two of the fastest growing automakers in the world.

How did Buick go from life support — when GM did its dramatic brand culling in 2009, many wondered why Buick wasn’t jettisoned along with Pontiac — to being the world’s fastest growing mainstream brand in the first half of 2016? How has Volvo, Ford’s last castoff during the Great Recession, managed to bounce back from near irrelevance?

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The easy answer — certainly the one making headlines — is that both looked east, the shared common thread that both, in their own way, were bailed out by China. Buick, thanks to an early — one might say prescient — decision to build plants in Shanghai, Yantai and Shenyang, is seen as a leading luxury — yes, luxury — brand in the world’s most populous nation. Chinese consumers bought almost 990,000 Buicks last year, virtually 80 per cent of all the cars the marque sold worldwide.

Meanwhile, Volvo was acquired by Geely, the implication in the mainstream media that mountains of Chinese cash would prop up what the Swedes obviously couldn’t afford to do. Well, while the latter may be true, Geely hardly fits the mold of foreign moneybags. It is, according to ChinaAutoWeb, only the 17th most popular passenger car brand in China, its annual sales dwarfed by Volkswagen, Changan and even Buick. Indeed, at the time of Volvo’s sale by Ford, many analysts didn’t think there was a hope in hell that the once proud Swedish marque could be resurrected, the Epoch Times particularly unkind in stating that “some analysts even expected Geely to simply absorb Volvo’s technology and liquidate the rest.”

Instead, both have fashioned their improbable resurrections the old-fashioned way, by building good cars. Buick’s revitalization has been built on — and here’s betting you haven’t noticed yet — styling and reliability. How hip is Buick? Well, Jalopnik.com, hardly a hub of Buick fandom, recently proclaimed that “we had to restrain ourselves from jumping across the hood [of the Avista coupe] and driving away with it at this year’s Detroit auto show. This sexy Buick is … the ticket to making the aging brand relevant again!””

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In China, where the brand is far more than just relevant, the transformation is even more dramatic. There, it is Mercedes-Benz that is considered “your grandfather’s car” which no self-respecting millennial would be seen driving. Buick, meanwhile, is considered the hippest of the hip, its average owner just 34 years old. Toss in the fact Buick is now the third-most dependable car in Consumer Reports’ recent dependability study — behind only Toyota and Lexus — and little wonder that the once-moribund brand has also grown some 25 per cent in the United States over the last five years and an even more impressive 40 per cent here in Canada.

And what can I say about Volvo? What were once boxes are now sleek, coupe-like sedans. The XC90 is once again the darling of the luxury SUV set and even its trademark wagons — have you checked out the V60 Polestar? — are fun and sporty. Those oft-maligned Chinese masters have injected a healthy dose of technology as well. Besides the electronic safety nannies we’ve come to expect from the world leader in automotive safety, there is the user-friendly, iPad-like Sensus infotainment system and, more importantly, one of the most innovative powertrains in automotivedom.

Volvo has promised to never make an engine with more than four cylinders — the new and wildly successful XC90 is the only full-sized luxury SUV to be powered by a four-banger. But what a four it is! Not just turbocharged — so commonplace these days that automakers barely advertise it — Volvo’s 2.0L is also supercharged. In peak form — as in the V60 Polestar that Driving recently tested — it’s good enough for 367 M3-challenging horsepower. Even more impressive, the same powerplant also forms the basis of the XC90 T8 plug-in hybrid. Yes, a supercharger, a turbocharger and an electric motor all force-feeding the same 2.0-litre four-cylinder. Who says all automotive innovation has to come from Europe, Japan or America?

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Of course, all is not perfect. We probably won’t be getting that Avista coupe I so lauded earlier because the Chinese don’t like two-door coupes, no matter how achingly gorgeous. And all Volvo’s technological goodness has yet to filter through the entire lineup (the V60 Polestar still has an infotainment system that looks like it was purloined from a five-year-old Kia).

That said, Buick and Volvo are the only mainstream automakers exporting cars manufactured in China, the low-volume S60 Inscription model having been available in the U.S. for the last year or so, and Buick now just beginning to sell the (hopefully) higher-volume Envision crossover.

There’s a seismic shift underway in the automotive industry, much of it the result of paradigm-changing interlopers from Silicon Valley. But, as Buick and Volvo reveal, “classics never make a comeback. They wait for that perfect moment to take the spotlight from overdone, tired trends.”

Tabatha Coffey — she’s the “star” of Tabatha Takes Over on Bravo — may have been talking about hairstyles when she summed up the renewed appeal of the familiar. Nonetheless, I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more from both automakers as consumers get tired of the same old, same old from traditional luxury marques.